{"id":4676,"date":"2010-05-09T08:59:19","date_gmt":"2010-05-09T08:59:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2010\/05\/09\/the-problem-of-theory\/"},"modified":"2010-05-09T08:59:19","modified_gmt":"2010-05-09T08:59:19","slug":"the-problem-of-theory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2010\/05\/09\/the-problem-of-theory\/","title":{"rendered":"The Problem of “Theory”"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I was writing about the seemingly contradictory meanings of “adiabatic”<\/a> the other day, I almost gave “theory” as an example of a word with nearly opposite meanings. After all, as anyone who has even glanced at the evolution-creation “debate” has heard, a “Theory” in science is something more exalted than a mere guess– it’s a guess that has been confirmed by observations and experiments, and can thus be regarded as true with a high degree of confidence (and assigned a capital letter in this post, to set it apart). (Also, in physical science at least, it makes quantitative predictions<\/a>.).<\/p>\n

I didn’t use it for two reasons. For one thing, it seemed to be inviting an argument that wasn’t remotely relevant to the subject of the post. More importantly, though, it’s not actually consistent with normal scientific usage. To put it more bluntly, I do not recall ever hearing a professional scientist make the theory\/Theory distinction in a scientific context (as opposed to a public debate– lots of people cite it when arguing against crazy people).<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In physics, at least, the operational definition of “theory” is “that which is not experiment.” The word gets used to apply to anything that isn’t a direct observation of reality. We even tend to use it for things that are demonstrably untrue– “local hidden variable theory<\/a>” is a common phrase in quantum circles, and the predictions of local hidden variable models have been shown to be wrong by something in excess of 100 standard deviations at this point. There’s no way that phrase could make any sense if scientists really hold to the more exalted meaning of “Theory.”<\/p>\n

In fact, if you think about it, if the distinction between the common use of “theory” as a sort of guess and the supposed scientific use of capital-T “Theory” as a well-confirmed and tested model of the universe was really generally held, you would never see a data plot with a line marked “theory” that failed to hit all the data points. And yet, for an experimentalist at least, there are few pleasures greater than showing a data plot where the theory line doesn’t come anywhere near the data– that’s where science gets interesting.<\/p>\n

Am I saying there’s a valid point to the “evolution is just a theory” rants? Absolutely not. The scientific use of “theory” is not restricted to the capital-T version, but it unquestionably encompasses it– the response “Yes, evolution is just a theory. So is gravity.” remains the correct one. But given that the day-to-day use of “theory” in science is so muddled, it’s no surprise that this is an area that can cause confusion for non-scientists.<\/p>\n

(And let’s not even talk about the humanities, where “theory” (as in “critical theory”) is often used in something close to the pejorative sense meant by denialists– a pre-existing ideological framework which is used to interpret any text you happen to run across, whether it makes obvious sense or not…)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I was writing about the seemingly contradictory meanings of “adiabatic” the other day, I almost gave “theory” as an example of a word with nearly opposite meanings. After all, as anyone who has even glanced at the evolution-creation “debate” has heard, a “Theory” in science is something more exalted than a mere guess– it’s… Continue reading The Problem of “Theory”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,7,28,23,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-physics","category-politics","category-quantum_optics","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4676"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4676\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}